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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Neighbourhood theatre where memories were made

Posted: 08/5/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

There's a bittersweet pang when a part of your childhood disappears. You don't have to be aware it's happening to feel the loss, to turn around one day and realize a constant has vanished. It might be as silly as Cabbage Patch Dolls or LPs. It might be as serious as the loss of the home you grew up in. It's all part of the story of you.

Garden City Cinemas, my teenage neighbourhood movie theatre, closes tonight. I saw everything there, from the scandalous Cabaret (I was 12) to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This was where the kids on my street went with new boyfriends and where the girls went with girlfriends after the inevitable adolescent breakup.

When I was a kid, we had the Hyland on Main Street, an easy ride on the North Main bus. It was 15 minutes from door to door. There was the cavernous Met downtown, where we'd sit in the balcony and pitch dry popcorn over the railing and look innocent when someone glared up at us.

That's where I saw Gone With The Wind, a movie so long it was split into two halves running an entire afternoon. The film was 35 years old but that didn't matter to me and my friends. It was a whole lot of entertainment for, what, 50 cents?

That was when you'd take a bus trip downtown just to see a movie and have fries with gravy at the Paddlewheel afterward. Our parents didn't think twice about letting us out into the world. We didn't think twice about taking our bikes or a bus wherever we wanted to go.

But Garden City Cinemas, the original before it was cleaved in two, was where kids in West Kildonan would head to see movies like The Poseidon Adventure or American Graffiti. Some of us were young enough that we needed to go with our parents. Others worked an hour to pay $1.25 for their ticket and a treat.

In the seventies, Garden City was the outer reaches of the city. The Maples didn't exist. Some people aspired to leave their small North End houses, move 10 blocks north and buy a brand new, slightly larger bungalow, landscaping not included. Lots of folks who claim to be from the North End actually grew up in West Kildonan or Garden City.

We were a city on the move but there was still plenty of room for growth. Most of us could not imagine how that growth would spiral out of control. When I was a kid, the mall location was still untamed field, a place were we convinced the younger kids that hoboes lived.

The building of Garden City Shopping Centre seemed to launch my quiet corner of the city into the big leagues. This was a time when a trip to Grand Forks was considered world travel.

There weren't any fancy seats at Garden City Cinemas, none of the glitz that goes with a modern suburban theatre. The floors were gummy with what seemed a lifetime of spilled Coke and the railings rubbed shiny with decades of popcorn grease. It was a popular place when there weren't so many other distractions for your time and money, when you found your fun in your neighbourhood.

Hard to believe, huh? What's the appeal in a neighbourhood theatre when there's always a parent willing to drive you across town?

Garden City Cinemas are dead because Cineplex Entertainment decided not to renew its lease. But it really died when we stopped really engaging in our neighbourhoods, stopped finding our entertainment and our community among those with whom we lived. It died because we always want what's shiny and better.

I haven't been to the mall in decades, although I work a 10-minute drive away. Since my parents sold the family home, I haven't been back to West Kildonan at all. The places that defined my childhood, like Pollock's Hardware, the West Kildonan Library and the Sears cafeteria haven't seen the likes of me in a very long time. My best friend's house was sold to strangers a few years back. H.C. Avery, where I went to kindergarten, has been a bilingual middle school for years.

I left the neighbourhood.

I hate that the neighbourhood is leaving me, too.

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 5, 2010 A2

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